Equipment details:
- Mount: OpenAstroMount by OpenAstroTech
- Lens: Sony 200-600 @ 600mm f/7.1
- Camera: Sony A7R III
- Guidescope: OpenAstroGuider (50mm, fl=153) by OpenAstroTech
- Guide Camera: SVBONY SV305m Pro
- Imaging Computer: ROCKPro64 running INDIGO server
Acquisition & Processing:
- Imaged and Guided/Dithered in Ain Imager
- 360x30s lights, 30 darks, 30 flats, 30 biases
- Stacked in Siril, background extraction, photometric color calibration, generalized hyperbolic stretch transform, and StarNet++
- Enhanced saturation of the galaxy and recombined with star mask in GIMP, desaturated and denoised background
Suggestions for improvement or any other form of constructive criticism welcome!
As an added comment, I think INDIGO and Ain Imager are worth trying for anyone using INDI, especially if you’re using a Sony camera. Sony cameras on INDIGO have focuser support and in my experience the driver is much more stable. Furthermore, the architecture of distributed agents controlling different functions makes setup easier and more performant on low-power and potentially slow wireless systems like an ARM single board computer.
To explain that a bit more, I image through Ain Imager on my Linux laptop. However, this imager program is more or less just a frontend where I select options, but everything is executed on the agents on the ROCKPro64. This includes imaging and frame capture, guiding, and plate solving. This has some benefits compared to KStars + INDI. For example, you avoid the latency of transferring a guider image to a laptop and then sending a message back to the SBC with a guiding pulse (you can avoid this on INDI by running PHD2 separately, but then you have the overhead of running a whole desktop environment), and you don’t need to wait to frames to download before starting another exposure (they’re downloaded asynchronously instead).
(Disclaimer - I contribute to INDIGO occasionally but I’m not a member of the project, just an open source developer adding features to it)
